


gloria ad augustae maritae

by thisisthefamilybusiness



Series: gloria [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Abuse, Abuse of Pregnant Woman, Caesar's Legion, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Legion Sexism, Canon-Typical Violence, Consent Issues, Domestic Violence, Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Internalized Misogyny, Master/Slave, Misogyny, Mojave Wasteland (Fallout), Original Character Death(s), Past Sexual Assault, Pre-Canon, Pre-Fallout: New Vegas, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:33:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23504656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisisthefamilybusiness/pseuds/thisisthefamilybusiness
Summary: In another life, Severina might have admired the girl. She was determined to seduce Caesar, as much as it was necessary to seduce him, and she was even more determined to do it in a way that spited the conventional order of things. Poppaea played her cards well: youth, innocence, even shunning the palla that marked the wives from the unmarried women.In this life, it’s tawdry and cheap.
Relationships: Caesar (Fallout)/Original Character(s), Caesar (Fallout)/Original Female Character(s), Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Series: gloria [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691236
Kudos: 16





	gloria ad augustae maritae

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for serious harm to a pregnant woman. I posted this separately from the next bit of the story so it could be skipped by those who don't jive with that.  
> There are references to off-screen sexual assault and rape. It isn't graphic nor is it described in detail.  
> The Legion is an evil faction, full of very bad people. This fic is full of misogyny, including sex slavery, human trafficking, and domestic violence.

Poppaea is eighteen years old and an untameable mess. Her red hair is never styled properly beneath her veil, her face is always sunburnt, her clothes are constantly askew, and—to Severina’s infinite annoyance—she thinks all of this is charming. Poppaea, for reasons Severina cannot comprehend, doesn’t seem to quite understand that the only reason Caesar likes any of his wives is that he can do whatever he wants to them, sexual or otherwise, with total impunity. There’s no actual _interest_ in any of them. 

She’s eating snack cakes when Severina enters the room Poppaea shares with Vita and Servilia, idly reclining on a sofa in only her tunic. The other wives snap to attention immediately, fussing at their own appearances and rising to their feet like soldiers for inspection. Severina clears her throat once and folds her arms over her chest as she stares at Poppaea.

“I’m not obligated to bow to you,” Poppaea says loudly, shoving half of a cake into her mouth and staring up at the ceiling. “I serve Caesar. Nobody else.” 

Severina’s rage tightens around her lungs. She steps forward and grabs Poppaea by the jaw, fingers digging into the girl’s soft skin as she forces Poppaea to look her in the eye. “They don’t bow because they have to. They bow because they know what I do for them.” Her fingernails press hard into Poppaea’s jaw. 

“What? Let him slap you around a little harder?” Poppaea grins. 

Servilia clears her throat. “Severina, please.” 

There will be bruises left on Poppaea’s skin, undoubtedly. “I run his household. Do you know what that makes me?” Severina says with a pleasantly fake smile.

Poppaea snorts. “A bitch.”

Severina’s hand cracks against Poppaea’s cheek with a sharp sound. Poppaea stumbles backward without Severina’s fingertips to hold her steady, rubbing at the angry red marks left by Severina’s fingernails and palm. “Caesar taught me that one.” She keeps her voice smooth. “I run this household, not Caesar. As long as you live in this house, you’ll obey my rules, or you’ll suffer whatever punishment I see fit.”

“You’d say anything to scare me,” Poppaea spits, looking at Vita and Servilia for support neither woman is willing to offer.

“Of course I would. It wouldn’t make it less true. I wrote the rulebook for this game. But if you want to play, then by all means, Poppaea.” There’s no kindness in Severina’s smile. She straightens her posture and nods at the other wives before she leaves the room. “You’ll go to bed hungry and alone tonight. Vita, Servilia, there’s a banquet tonight. You two should be ready to entertain,” she says, hand on the doorframe.

* * *

“Isn’t this good?” Severina hisses, curling her fingers into Caesar’s shoulders with a sigh. She grins like it’s good, closing her eyes and biting her lower lip, but he doesn’t reply. She arches her back, pushes her tits out. Severina knows how to make sex good. For over a decade, it’s been the only thing she’s had any sort of pride or confidence in. 

Caesar grimaces as he comes without warning, one hand reaching up to squeeze at her nipple. Severina gasps like she came and shivers as she rolls off him. “The neediest of wives,” he grunts. 

“I’m your favorite,” Severina says, with a forced breathlessness. 

“The--the greatest of the wives--whatever the fuck it is your fucking title is. Fuck.” Caesar sits up with a grunt and grabs for his glass of water on Severina’s bedside table. He gulps it down desperately. 

Severina grins, and for the first time in half an hour, it’s not a faked expression. “Tighter than I was when I was seventeen.” She bathes for a second in the feeling: glory, satisfaction. The best of the best, first among Caesar’s wives, no matter what a prissy teenager said. 

* * *

Lunch is the only meal that Severina usually takes alone. Breakfast is for briefing and meeting with the other wives, and dinner is taken with Caesar--both in her rooms, at the private dining table, formal meals with structure and sense to them. Along with getting dressed in the morning, lunch is the only time that Severina designates explicitly to be alone.

Poppaea, like with all other things, is intentionally ignorant of this. She insists on a lunchtime meeting, knowing that Severina has no plans that could justify her rescheduling the meeting. 

In another life, Severina might have admired the girl. She was determined to seduce Caesar, as much as it was necessary to seduce him, and she was even more determined to do it in a way that spited the conventional order of things. Poppaea played her cards well: youth, innocence, even shunning the palla that marked the wives from the unmarried women. 

In this life, it’s tawdry and cheap. Poppaea is eighteen, not twelve, and Caesar was just as likely to pick her for the night as he was to pick any of his other wives, despite how hard she played at her clumsy innocent schoolgirl act. Severina barely manages to stop her eyes from rolling backwards when Poppaea flounces into their lunch meeting with her red hair braided and coiled in a crown over her head like the girls still young enough to be under the care of the priestesses. 

Severina intentionally is already seated when Poppaea enters, food set out on trays at the dining table. Poppaea might be young, but Severina has experience. “You wanted to talk,” Severina says curtly, smiling politely. 

Poppaea neatly folds herself into the chair opposite Severina. She pulls a cluster of grapes from a silver tray and plops them onto her plate. “I haven’t been taking your birth control.” There’s the barest signs of a smile on Poppaea’s face--the corners of her mouth twitching upwards. 

“A stupid decision.” Severina takes a tiny bite out of a piece of brahmin’s milk cheese. None of the slaves had mentioned any of the women refusing their nightly medicine, but Severina has no particular reason to trust any of the slaves. 

“And I’m pregnant.” Poppaea grins like she’s just played her trump card, popping a grape into her mouth. “Eight weeks.” 

Severina’s blood runs cold, and something twists deep within her core: not jealousy, not envy, just hatred. It’s the same rage that she thought she’d had beaten out of her years ago, a black seething thing that makes it hard for her to think clearly. “You know I can’t let you do this,” she says quietly. 

“Why? Just because I’m threatening the pretty life you made for yourself here?” Perhaps, Severina allows, swallowing down some of her rage, Poppaea wasn’t as stupid as she acted. 

“For thirteen years, I’ve rolled over on my back and let Edward fucking Sallow have his way with me. I’ve let him do things to me you can’t even imagine. I have earned every single part of this pretty little life I’ve made for myself in blood and sweat and sex. Do you think I’m going to let some teenage whore from the fucking desert ruin that for me?” Deep down, in the ashes of the woman that Severina might have been, she’s ashamed of how easily this all comes to her. The ghost of a memory flits across her mind, a pallid blinded woman raising her hand in a salute: glory to Severina Augusta.

“My entire life’s been this Legion,” Poppaea snaps back. “Since I was six. Priestesses and Mars and Caesar, and now I got a chance to be better than that. You think you’re special just because you’ve fucked a man for longer?” 

Severina slams her hand down onto her table so hard she knocks over her own glass of water, spills the vase of decorative flowers. “Get out of my room.” 

Poppaea laughs as she leans back in her chair. “Or what?”

“Or the next time I see you, you’ll be tied to a cross.” Poppaea’s facade collapses with the threat, and suddenly she just looks like a child. Is this the woman Severina has become? “Get out of my room,” Severina repeats, quieter. 

For once in her life, Poppaea is completely silent, subservient as she trips over her own feet to leave.

* * *

Favors are cheap among slaves and cheaper still amongst soldiers. Lucinda in the kitchens can write and wants to know if her son survived a battle. Titus in the lowest ranks of the Praetorians promises to hold on to a letter and wants her to watch how he touches himself. Everyone has a price. 

This is the game that Poppaea failed to understand. People will trample one another into the ground at the chance to make their own lives the slightest bit less miserable. 

It takes less than two days and five favors before Severina storms into the junior wives’ room with three of the villa’s guards at her back, face flushed with all the fury she’s been holding back. “Poppaea Caesaris,” she says, loudly as she can manage without yelling. 

Poppaea is barely awake from her midday nap when two of the guards grab her by the shoulders and push her out of bed. “I didn’t do anything,” she immediately begins babbling. “I didn’t do anything.”

“He said the letters are under her mattress.” Severina pushes the mattress off the shoddy metal frame easily enough. Sure enough, there are three letters hiding underneath, crumpled from being crushed into the bed slats. Severina snatches them up like a prize. “There, the letters. Is that not enough, Gallio?”

Gallio, the oldest of the guards and the only one not physically restraining Popaea, nods. He’s been trapped as a guard for two years now, no hope of advancing to Praetorian or commandership unless something drastic happened. 

Something just like unearthing a plot against Caesar, for example. 

“Poppaea Caesaris, you have conspired against our great leader, Caesar, and our sacred Legion. What’s your defense?” Gallio takes the letters from Severina’s hands like the wild dogs take bait the houndmaster leaves out. “What excuse can you make for yourself?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Poppaea’s furious. Her face is as bright red as the tatoes Severina’s seen soldiers carry back from the north as she turns to Severina as much as she can manage. “I didn’t do anything!” 

“You don’t get to be angry after what you did!” Severina doesn’t even have to act anymore. “Don’t you have any shame?” She gets to a count of ten before there’s a furor outside the door, storming in: Caesar and the Praetorian Guards, drawn in from their meeting in his rooms by the screaming and shouting. 

“What the fuck is happening?” Caesar demands. 

Severina takes an intentionally shaky curtsy towards Caesar before she speaks. “Poppaea has tried to--”

“You lying bitch, I didn’t try to do anything! You’re fucking crazy!” Whatever Poppaea was going to say is cut off by one of the guards stomping on her bare foot. She dissolves into sobs. 

“Poppaea’s been having an affair with one of the guards, Divus Caesar,” Severina says, unflinchingly. “And she would have passed off the bastard she’s pregnant with as your child, if I hadn’t heard about it. Gallio has their letters.”

“She’s right, sir.” Gallio pulls a new letter from the pocket on his belt. “I found this one on Titus Canisius, one of the guards stationed near the kitchen.” 

Caesar grabs the letter Gallio overs and skims over it. His face twists into anger when he looks up. “Fucking women,” he grunts. He crumples the paper into a ball and tosses it to the floor. “Give a woman a little freedom and this is what they fucking do.” 

For a split second, fear freezes Severina’s ability to breathe. She couldn’t read the letters Lucinda wrote, but Gallio hadn’t spotted anything phony about them when he picked them up. 

“Hang them both, I don’t give a shit,” Caesar says with a dismissive hand wave. “And someone who isn’t a moron, make sure this plan ends with the two of them.” 

Severina didn’t know what she expected to feel as the tension unraveled in the room. Relief, maybe, at seeing Poppaea dragged out of the palace? _Something_. 

She’d wanted to feel something. 

But she doesn’t feel anything at all. 

* * *

“ _You’re a good woman,”_ Atia once whispered to Severina. “ _Underneath it all. I know it. The heart of you is still good.”_

Behind her red veils, Severina flinches at the sound of breaking bones. A few soldiers jeer, laughing like they’re watching a performance. Poppaea’s feet dangle limply a few inches off the dusty cracked pavement. 

Severina can’t bring herself to look at Poppaea’s corpse. Was she allowed to feel disgust at soldiers laughing when it’s only because of her that a hanging happened at all? Isn’t this what she wanted? She won. 

She doesn’t cry. Severina barely even feels guilty, barely even feels regret. That’s the worst part of it all: that when finally, Severina became equals to Edward Sallow, she felt _nothing_.

  
  



End file.
